DEFAULT=DENY:
Mediating Trust in the Panopticon

Who Am I? Authenticating Identity and Reputation in Trust-based Systems

This page links to research, working papers, articles, presentations and other material relating to CAS work on the use of trusted systems for security or social control. In particular, this project stage is focused on the use of identification and the authentication of identity and reputation to mediate trust-based systems ("trusted systems").

Trusted systems for purposes of this research are systems in which some conditional prediction about the behavior of people or objects within the system has been determined prior to authorizing access to system resources. For example, trusted systems include the use of "security envelopes" in national security and counterterrorism applications, "trusted computing" initiatives in technical systems security, and the use of identity or credit scoring systems in financial and anti-fraud applications; in general, they include any system (i) in which probabilistic threat or risk analysis is used to assess "trust" for decision-making before authorizing access or for allocating security resources against likely threats (including their use in the design of systems constraints to control behavior within the system), or (ii) in which deviation analysis or systems surveillance is used to insure that behavior within systems complies with expected or authorized parameters..

The adoption of these authorization-based security strategies (where the default state is DEFAULT=DENY) for counterterrorism and anti-fraud is helping accelerate the ongoing transformation of modern societies from a notional Beccarian model of criminal justice based on accountability for deviant actions after they occur, see Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment (1764), to a Foucauldian model based on authorization, preemption, and general social compliance through ubiquitous preventative surveillance and control through system constraints. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975, Alan Sheridan, tr., 1977, 1995). [And, ultimately, to a Deleuzian model of a "control society," see Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on Control Societies, L'Autre Journal, No. 1 (May 1990)].

In this emergent model, "security" is geared not towards policing but to risk management through surveillance, exchange of information, auditing, communication, and classification. These developments have led to general concerns about individual privacy and civil liberty and to a broader philosophical debate about the appropriate forms of social governance methodologies. Our work in this area examines these issues.

"Identification Systems and Domestic Security: Who's Who in Whoville" Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Arlington, VA, "The Politics and Law of Identity and Identification in the Context of the War on Terror," Jan. 28, 2004 [download presentation]

"Who's Who in Whoville? Congress should not rush to legislate a massive government identity surveillance system under the press of a politically expedient deadline without considering alternatives that can meet legitimate law enforcement and national security needs while still protecting privacy," PLENSIA conference October 29, 2005. [Full Statement]

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